Just to throw in even more confusion, many Asian countries follow the Chinese numbering schemes which goes in 10^4（万）, 10^8（億）, 10^12（兆）, 10^16（京） etc...
This is why Fujitsu's World-beating Kei(京) supercomputer is named that way, because its design speed was to be 10 Petaflops, or 1京 flops...

Try India, even in English. You have to deal with lakh (100,000 or 10^5) and crore (10,000,000 or 10^7). These are commonly used, particularly for money and in newspapers and are written 1,00,000 and 1,00,00,000.

Interestingly, in China itself (or at least mainland China), there's a fair amount of confusion over what 兆 is supposed to be -- 10^12 is the traditional and generally agreed value, but some argue it should be 10^6, and 兆 is actually the official mainland translation of the prefix "mega-" (10^6). For this reason it's commonly avoided altogether, with 10^6 normally referred to as 百万 (literally "a hundred ten thousand") and 10^12 as 万亿 ("ten thousand hundred million"). Not wholly dissimilar from the short scale/long scale issue in European languages.

Well, the same thing happens regarding Portuguese speakers in Portugal and Brazil. Like the Americans (or rather because of them), we Brazilians use the short scale (bilhão, trilhão). I wonder, though, if that also occurs all across Spanish speaking Latin America...

Maybe the terms semicontinuous proposed (which are largely used by engineers) are a good alternative. So we'd be saying things like 2 gigadollars instead of 2 billion dolars.

Even so, but you must admit that, in the moment, one would hope the pilot of your aircraft can cross check his instrument panel correctly, especially on IFR.

For thermodymanics that's what the computer is for and I'd bet the guts are using metric. I'm sorry but pounds, slugs and feet are terrible units and I have fond memories of the distaste physics lecturers showed them.

One problem with the American usage is it is so wasteful of prefixes. As budgets rise we are already at the point where Americans are asking what comes after trillions, but if we'd all chosen the long scale, that point would still be many decades away, if not longer.

I forgot to say -- I think the statement that "milliard" originally meant 10 to the 12th is wrong. It's not supported by the page of the book which I get when I click on the link you provide. That page only says that it meant 10 to the 9th.

The old dean of my former department abandoned millions, milliards, billions, and billiards even for counting money. Instead he used normal prefixes: kilo, mega, etcetera. Thus he said "14 mega euro" in place of "14 million euro" and "2 giga dollars" instead of whatever that might be.